How things look through an Oregonian's eyes

October 31, 2011

Oh, yeah! Right on! That's what my mind screamed when I opened the mailbox a few days ago and saw the headline on the cover of New Scientist: "Unscientific America -- A dangerous retreat from reason."

So true.

It's mostly Republicans who are trying to lead us back to the Dark Ages of irrationality, even though a New Scientist editorial on this subject tries (semi-successfully) to spread the anti-science blame.

Even today, as China and India flex their muscles, the world still looks to the US for leadership.

This is especially true in science. A nation founded on the Enlightenment has melded massive investment in research, an open door to the world's best minds and unparalleled entrepreneurism to become a powerhouse of innovation. Leaf through a typical issue of New Scientist, and you will witness American ingenuity on almost every page.

This is why the tone and content of some recent political debate in the US is so disquieting. When candidates for the highest office in the land appear to spurn reason, embrace anecdote over scientific evidence, and even portray scientists as the perpetrators of a massive hoax, there is reason to worry. Fortunately, there is no reason to panic.

On issues including climate change, evolution and public health, it may seem as if the forces of anti-science are in the ascendancy. If you look through the lens of history or apply a scientific approach, however, logical explanations for these apparently perverse positions emerge (see "Science in America: Decline and fall" and "Science in America: Selling the truth").

What also becomes clear is that no political party has a monopoly on unscientific thinking. While the most alarming statements may be coming from Republican quarters today, don't forget that it was a three-time Democratic presidential candidate who led the attack on evolution at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

Well, when the best example of Democratic unscientific thinking dates from 86 years ago, this shows how modern attacks on science are almost universally from the Republican side of the political spectrum.

It's deeply bizarre, how every G.O.P. presidential candidate other than Jon Huntsman (who has been punished in the polls for his defense of science) is unwilling to embrace the reality of global warming, evolution, and other scientific truths.

It's depressing reading, especially since we're faced with the near certainty of Republicans nominating an anti-science presidential candidate and, sadly, a decent chance of having this worshipper at the altar of irrationality elected.

The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It's all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax." So said Michele Bachmann, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, in 2008. Bachmann also thinks that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can cause mental retardation and that science classes should include creationism. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don't think it's a good idea for government to come down on one side of a scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides."

Bachmann's rival, Texas governor Rick Perry, advocates biblically based abstinence-only sex education. He argues that evolution is "a theory that is out there - and it's got some gaps in it". On climate change, Perry says "the science is not settled... just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact... Galileo got outvoted for a spell".

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells voters that embryonic stem cell research is "killing children in order to have research materials". Rising Republican star Herman Cain claims there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is anything other than a personal choice.

Republicans diverge from anti-science politics at their peril. When leading candidate Mitt Romney said: "I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer... humans contribute to that", conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh responded with "Bye bye, nomination". Romney back-pedalled, saying, "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans."

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman argued that "the minute that the Republican party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem". Huntsman has since been marginalised by Republican pundits.

Otto lays out reasons for the decline and fall of our once unquestioned leadership in science, then says:

These factors have combined to create an assault on science that is unprecedented in American history. Cut loose from objective truth, America's public dialogue has become one of warring opinions and policy paralysis.

In another article about how to "sell the truth," Peter Aldhous cheered me up somewhat by explaining how supporters of science can beat reality-deniers at their own game.Download Science in America

For example, he says that the most ardent global warming skeptics are Tea Party types. So it makes sense to have people with whom they resonate explain the climatological facts to them.

For these [Tea Party] voters, the cultural filter seems to be the idea that taking action to limit climate change means "big government" intervention in the US economy, anathema to staunch conservatives.

Hammering another nail into the coffin of the deficit [of knowledge] model, Kahan's latest survey of more than 1500 US adults indicates that far from overcoming our cultural biases, education actually strengthens them. Among those with greater numeracy and scientific literacy, opinions on climate change polarised even more strongly.

Kahan's explanation is that we have a strong interest in mirroring the views of our own cultural group. The more educated we become, he argues, the better we get at making the necessary triangulation to adopt the "correct" opinions. On issues like climate change, for most people these cultural calculations trump any attempt to make an objective assessment of the evidence.

...So who might do a better job of carrying the climate message to conservative ears? Perhaps the US military, which is worried about the security implications of climate change, or senior figures within the insurance industry, who are factoring the risk of more frequent severe weather events into their calculations.

Good ideas, but every science-admiring person in the United States has to defend objective truth against those who are attempting to substitute for it their own fantasies, opinions, and self-serving falsehoods.

Subjectivity is a big part of being human. "I like..." and "I believe..." are eminently proper attitudes which everybody is entitled to. But NOT when it comes to objective reality. That belongs to everybody. It is the common ground of humanity. No one is entitled to hijack it for their own ends.

I understand that many people want to believe that fossil fuels can be freely used with no adverse consequences. I realize that Al Gore irritates conservatives who suspect that he is making up global warming myths so a One World government can control everything and everybody. If these private irrationalities remained in individual psyches, I'd say "enjoy your fantasies."

However, reality is too important to waste. Neither the United States, nor the rest of the world, can afford to have political discourse dominated by heads-in-the-sand anti-science zealots who refuse to acknowledge facts.

It's time to fight back. Truth has to be defended. On the back cover of Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon Haunted World," are these words. They're as true now as they were back in 1995, when the book was published.

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces...

I worry that, especially as the Millenium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before?

Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us -- then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

October 29, 2011

Hearing about the news that females are now equal to males in succeeding to the British throne, my initial reaction was "it's about time." Why shouldn't a first born girl be in line for Queen'ness, just as a first born boy is in line for King'ness?

Almost immediately, though, my second reaction was "it's absurd that Britain and the Commonwealth still have this monarchy thing."

Yet when I did a Google search on monarchy why, I was surprised to find that most of the top search results were sites defending the monarchy. It took me some scrolling to come to the first Republicanism-leaning result, "Why the monarchy must go."

It's kind of creepy to find myself agreeing with Republicanism, but the word has a very different meaning in Britain than in the United States. This isn't a political party. It's a movement to ditch the monarchy.

Which makes perfect sense from an American perspective. I wonder if British citizens know how weird it seems from a U.S.A. point of view to spend tons of money on palaces and such to keep a royal family in the style they've become hereditarily accustomed to.

Of course, I readily admit that our political system must appear equally strange to Britons. We've got a dysfunctional Congress, including a thoroughly undemocratic Senate where majority rule doesn't exist any more.

I can't understand why Britain clings to the monarchy.

I guess it has to do with tradition. Maybe having a King and Queen reminds people of the old days when Britain ruled the seas, along with much of the world's land mass. The royal pomp and ceremony also looks cool, albeit disconcertingly undemocratic to these American eyes.

Plus, Britain doesn't have anything equivalent to our Hollywood. It looks to me like the royal family fulfills the role that movie stars do in the United States: people to gossip about, whose every move is photographed and clothing choices talked about.

Fine. The monarchy still seems deeply weird to me.

(Here's an editorial in the Guardian that casts some light on how Britons view the monarchy, but I'm still pretty much in the dark on this. OK, the present day royal family arrangement, and a requirement that monarchs be Protestant, goes back to the 1600's. That's a long time. But now always is a good time to change ridiculous social policies.)

October 27, 2011

Our electronic air cleaner and I have a rocky relationship. It's down in our crawlspace, attached to our heat pump duct work. Every three months or so I vacuum the air cleaner's removable filters, which requires taking its door off.

And more often than I'd like to admit -- but since this is a self-revealing blog, I'll admit it -- I have a tough time getting the door back on.

The door has metal flanges that fit behind its metal enclosure. A diagram on the door shows how it's supposed to fit over the enclosure, after which two gizmos are rotated to lock the door in place. Sounds simple, and it is.

When I'm not doing something stupid.

Before I take the door off, I always look at how its attached to maximize my chances of getting it back on smoothly. But today I forgot almost immediately that the right side of the door flange fits over the lip of the metal encosure, while the left side fits within the lip.

I've forgotten this before also.

So you'd think, just as I'd think, that a non-senile (so far as I know, but I might be the last to know) 63 year-old guy who isn't a complete idiot about most stuff in life wouldn't have to spend over half an hour fussing with an air cleaner door, trying all the things that didn't work the last time he had trouble getting the door back on, and not just once or twice or thrice, but repetitively to the point of obsessively.

To such a degree, eventually my wife stuck her head into the crawl space and said, "Are you still trying to get the air cleaner door on? Maybe you should get help from a neighbor, or call Judson's" (the company that installed our heat pump).

I wasn't wild about either suggestion.

I'd retained enough self-awareness beneath the surface of my steadily increasing frustration to know that the solution to my problem was going to appear amazingly simple once it was found. The last thing I wanted was some other guy to pick up the door, place it on the air cleaner housing, turn the locks so they made a satisfying click, then turn to me and say, "There, all done," while thinking Geez, Brian is a freaking idiot.

I wanted to say that to myself, just as I have many times.

So I took a short break to acquire a flashlight and screwdriver, neither of which I actually needed. I just wanted to take a few breaths out of the crawlspace and see whether my brain could pop up with the simple solution that I intuited was close at hand somewhere in my psyche's subconscious depths.

After returning to the air cleaner it didn't take long for Bingo! With a clearer mind, I stopped assuming that my problem was either X, Y, or Z and tried something different. In a few seconds the door had popped on cleanly, I'd turned the locks, and pressed the power button. We were back in business, air cleaning-wise.

I immediately made a note of how the door needs to fit on the housing so, hopefully, I'll never have to repeat the frustration of doing this particular stupid thing. Assuming, of course, that I remember to look at the note.

Wanting to feel like some good came out of those 45 minutes or so of crawl space wasted-time, I've been trying to discover a broader lesson from my experience. The most obvious, of course, is that we can't know what we don't know we don't know.

Meaning, if I know that I don't know something, I can act to fill that gap in my knowledge. These days, a bit of Googling works wonders with most factual lacks. But when I'm looking in a completely wrong direction, when I don't even know what I don't know (sort of like physics' not even wrong), I'm stuck.

No exit. No way out. Until something changes, I'm doomed to wander in a Problem Maze where the same blank walls keep blocking my way; I back up, try another path, and find myself back at the same place.

My wife had the right idea: broaden my horizons by reaching out to someone else and getting a fresh perspective. Back in my Systems Science Ph.D. Program days, I remember an exercise where our small group had to figure out how many marbles, or whatever they were, filled a large container. The average of all of our guesses was pretty darn accurate, even though individual guesses varied widely.

Down in the crawl space, there was only me.

Faced with a relatively trivial problem, I felt justified in banging my head against the air cleaner wall (metaphorically) until I came up with the solution that had worked for me before, but which I'd forgotten. Bullheadedness has its place, especially in the male ego.

But with more significant problems it isn't smart to not realize how stupid you are acting. When you find yourself going around and around, getting a kick in the butt from someone else can lead to a helpful change in direction. Our tendency to do what we've done before, even when it isn't working, is a well-known characteristic of the human brain.

I've been thinking about this when I read about how the Super Committee charged with coming up with a deficit reduction plan apparently is in a stalemate. Republicans refuse to consider tax increases; Democrats are reluctant to propose reductions in social programs like Medicare.

Yet the general public, along with almost all mainstream economists, know that both tax increases and benefit reductions are going to be necessary. This is another example of how continuing to do something just because it's what you've always done leads to stupidity -- an air cleaner door that won't go on; a federal deficit that won't go away.

Today I learned that the solution to my door problem was simple and close at hand. I just was focused in the wrong direction, on approaches that I kept trying because they were familiar (also, wrong). Likewise, I keep waiting for Congress to get smart about the federal budget: more revenue and less spending.

Simple. Real simple.

Unfortunately, it isn't easy to realize that you don't even know what you need to know. Which in the case of Congress is... compromise, moderation, driving in the middle of the political road.

Today I saw that TypePad, my blogging service, is asking its bloggers to give them some feedback. "Tell us how likely you are to recommend TypePad."

I jumped right on that request.

I was disappointed to see that comments on the feedback post were disabled, which doesn't convey the message that TypePad is genuinely open to discussion about how their blogging platform can be improved.

But after giving TypePad a "2" out of "10" on the recommend question (meaning, I'd be unlikely to recommend TypePad) I felt better after utilizing an open-ended comment box to tell TypePad what I've been saying -- over and over -- for many years.

For years I and other bloggers have been asking, and waiting, for improvements to the core TypePad system. Very few have manifested. As I've noted in comments/advice repeatedly, my 99 cent iPhone apps get new features much more often than TypePad does.

This is frustrating. You seem to have given up on improving the core TypePad platform, focusing instead on rolling out new themes (whoopee) and telling us bloggers how to code our own "improvements" in a complex RSS or whatever fashion (useless to me).

Yes, I'm happy that TypePad no longer crashes on me and it works quite reliably. But I can't remember the last time I thought "Wow, this is a great new TypePad feature!" It just seems like you take your subscribers for granted and aren't dedicated to continual improvement as, again, us Apple product users are accustomed to.

So I'd tell aspiring bloggers to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with TypePad. Having been blogging regularly since 2003 on two blogs, I have a very large Google search presence and it would be disturbing to start over with a new URL. (But believe me, I've thought about it.)

October 25, 2011

Les Schwab (the tire center) and I have a long relationship, all positive so far. Sure, we part company on the "Free Beef" deal -- how about some free tofu? -- and we've got different views on a proposed Oregon studded tire ban, but I really like the Les Schwab commitment to customer service.

There's quite a few stories on the Internet about how a Les Schwab employee went above and beyond the call of duty to help someone with a tire problem. Mine isn't as dramatic as most, but I still want to share how my lug nut problem got solved today at the south Salem Les Schwab store.

My wife, the primary driver of the Leaf, hates to put on regular quick-fit chains even more than I do. So I did some searching for an alternative to the kneel-down-and-reach-around approach (sounds kind of erotic, but when the object of your attention is a tire, believe me, it isn't).

I discovered the Thule K-Summit, a technological marvel, albeit a spendy one. Like Spikes-Spiders, the chains attach entirely from the outside of the tire. A difference, though, is that the K-Summit doesn't require a geeky looking adapter like Spikes-Spiders do.

So I ordered a set for the Leaf.

Only problem was, the gizmo that attaches the Thule chains to a front wheel lug nut wouldn't tighten down firmly. I could tell that I was using the correctly sized lug nut adapter, but when I tried to tighten the gizmo's screw it would end up feeling decidedly loose.

Thule, with its Swedish origin, follows the IKEA practice of providing instructions that are almost 100% pictorial. No words, just diagrams showing what to do. Also, what not to do. With some effort, my unmechanical brain was able to decipher the apparent meaning of a diagram that was so important, it was shown on a card attached to the chains themselves.

A red "X" showed what shouldn't occur when putting on the K-Summit chains: the gizmo should fit completely over a lug nut, not attach to it in a half-assed fashion. Yet that's what I kept encountering with the Leaf lug nuts. Which, upon a closer inspection than I've ever given a lug nut, were strangely rounded on the end.

I needed help. I phoned Portland's Rack Attack and was told that Thule didn't have an adapter for weirdly shaped lug nuts that were too long for the gizmo to attach to. The Rack Attack guy agreed with me that replacement lug nuts would be the only solution.

So this afternoon I found myself at the south Salem Les Schwab, kneeling beside one of our Leaf's tires, showing an attentive Tire Center employee the Thule K-Summit chains, plus all of the adapters that wouldn't fit, demonstrating to him how the lug nuts were acting, well, nutty.

After a few minutes he said, "I'll get some replacement nuts and be right back." Which he was, quickly, because Les Schwab employees don't walk when they're outside the main office/display area -- they run.

When he came back with a couple of possible replacement lug nuts, we played around with them for another five minutes or so. I wanted to be sure that the gizmo would tighten properly around a new nut, and it took my nonmechanical brain longer than the employee's to figure out that new lug nut X would work, whereas new lug nut Y wouldn't.

Once we'd settled on the replacement lug nuts, the Les Schwab employee said he'd round up ten of them and I could pay for them inside. Then, even though I've put on quite a few lug nuts in my time, I successfully played the Helpless Customer Game -- which, this being Les Schwab, I was confident would end up winningly.

"OK, that sounds fine...um, but the Leaf doesn't have a spare tire, so I may not have the right tool to replace the lug nuts. And I'm not that familiar with torqueing. So, um, could you possibly put on the lug nuts for me?"

Yes, he was happy to. He had me move the Leaf behind another car being worked on in a service bay, then jogged over with an air gun -- which I told him was a handy device missing from our garage.

I had just enough time to check email on my iPhone using the Les Schwab wi-fi service and grab a bag of popcorn from the waiting area. The eminently helpful employee then came in and totaled up my bill after talking with me for about fifteen minutes about the lug nuts, and spending another five to ten minutes taking off the old lug nuts and putting on the new ones.

At two bucks a nut, my VISA charge was $20. Well worth it, since without the right lug nuts my oh-so-cool Thule K-Summit chains would have had to be returned. Now the chains seem to fit great.

(Here's another love-reason: yesterday the same Les Schwab Tire Center put on four winter tires/wheels on our Highlander Hybrid for free, temporarily replacing the Toyo all season tires that I'd bought at Les Schwab.)

But it's time (way past time, really) for Salem to evolve out of its ultraviolet phase of development. I'm tired of having friends and relatives visit from out of state and being stumped when my wife and I think, "What to do?"

October 21, 2011

With baseball season nearing its end, I find it fitting that Republicans are striking out on key national policy issues more and more these days.

That's good news for Obama's re-election chances, and for Democratic prospects in general come the 2012 election. I'm starting to feel better about where this country is heading, even though Republican intransigence and filibustering won't allow much to happen in Congress until voters repudiate the G.O.P. a year from next month.

Here's some examples of what's buoying my spirits:

Occupy Wall Street. This is the left's Tea Party moment. Except, Occupy Wall Street (or wherever) has a lot more support among the general population than the Tea Party does. Fifty-nine percent of adults either completely or mostly agree with the protesters. Young people are back to being politically energized. Hopefully this will carry over into the 2012 election. Populism is on the march.

Gadhaffi is dead, Libya liberated. The nay-sayers who ignorantly bemoaned Obama "leading from behind" have been proven wrong. Obama's decision-making on Libya has been vindicated. Forming a coalition to support the rebels in a way that didn't make it look like United States imperialism turned out to be the right decision. Republicans were wrong.

All U.S. troops will leave Iraq soon. Obama has kept his campaign promise to end the ill-fated Iraq War. There won't be any U.S. forces there after 2011, aside from 150 troops to guard the embassy. George Bush was wrong to invade Iraq since Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to our country. But Obama has gotten U.S. policy back on track, in line with public opinion.

Global warming even more proven. Scientifically, for quite a while it's been virtually certain that the Earth is warming rapidly, and that humans are responsible for this. However, climate change skeptics funded by the fossil fuel industry have succeeded in planting seeds of doubt among the public. A new study has dealt a blow to skeptics, though.

An independent study of global temperature records has reaffirmed previous conclusions by climate scientists that global warming is real.

The new analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project examined 1.6 billion temperature reports from 15 data archives stretching back over 200 years in an effort to address scientific concerns raised by climate skeptics about the data used to inform reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Researchers found "reliable evidence" of a rise in average world land temperatures of one degrees Celsius -- or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit -- since the mid-1950s.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the United States and the UK," professor Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth's scientific director said in a statement.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions," Muller added.

Soon, I hope, Republicans are going to find that you can't fool voters for very long. The truth eventually wins out. Reality strides on stage and screams, "Hey, look at me, not those bozos over there!" Obama and the Democrats have the facts on their side. That'll come in handy during the next election.

The Oregon Court of Appeals also got corrected, but mildly, as the Supreme Court affirmed a decision on appeal to deny Cook the right to continue on with a 10-lot Measure 37 subdivision that he'd spent $155,000 on before Measure 49 put an end to development in late 2007. The Supreme Court agreed with the Court of Appeals, yet for different reasons.

Having led a successful fight in our own neighborhood against a Measure 37 subdivision that threatened our ground and surface water, I'm familiar with the vested rights issues in this Supreme Court case.

After a quick reading of the 42-page opinion, I'm gratified to find that, in non-legal speak: Nyah, nyah! We were right and you were wrong!!

"We" being me, our attorneys (Ralph Bloemers of the Crag Law Center, who ably argued the Supreme Court case, and Sean Malone), and other attorneys/judges/land use advocates who understood the common law of vesting a lot better than would-be subdivision developers and miguided decision-makers did -- the "you's."

The Supreme Court affirmed that whether someone can go ahead with a development after a law has changed that now prohibits it depends in part on the ratio of what's been spent compared to the total cost of development.

This was part of the Supreme Court's landmark vested rights decision in 1973, Holmes. However, attorneys for Measure 37 developers and pave-it-over minded county commissioners were fond of arguing that "$100,000 (or whatever other amount) is a substantial amount of money," ignoring the obvious fact that substantial is in the eye of the beholder.

To a billionaire, $100,000 is a rounding error. To a poor person, it's a heck of a lot of money.

So in this decision the Supreme Court affirmed that the Yamhill County Commissioners and Circuit Court should have compared Cook's total cost of development, which would include building houses on his lots, to the $155,000 he spent prior to the effective date of Measure 37, December 6, 2007.

Regarding that date, the Supreme Court also agreed with another point that our attorneys, Ralph and Sean, made in our own legal briefs. Namely, that just because Measure 49 spoke of being vested on the effective date of Measure 49, this doesn't mean that anything a developer did prior to that date was fine and dandy legally.

After Oregon Voters passed Measure 49 in early November 2007, quite a few Measure 37 claimants spent the next month ripping up the farm/forest land they wanted to develop in an attempt to incur as many construction costs as possible. In some cases bulldozers, pavers, excavating equipment and such operated almost around the clock.

Which, in the common law of vesting, is known as trying to beat the clock -- a no-no from the standpoint of "good faith," one of the vested rights criteria in Holmes.

Meaning, when someone knows that a law has been changed and is about to go into effect, it's not cool to rush ahead and try to circumvent that law. Land use laws promote the general welfare. In the case of Measure 49, a clear majority of Oregonians said "We want to protect farm, forest, and groundwater limited land from development."

Yet many Measure 37 claimants heard that message and ignored it, racing ahead to pave over their property in what turned out to be a vain attempt to gain a vested right -- given today's Supreme Court decision, which said that it is up to the "trier of fact" to determine whether someone's development actions constitute good faith or bad faith. Merely stopping work on a new law's effective date isn't automatically a sign of good faith.

All in all, the folks at Friends of Yamhill County and the Crag Law Center should be popping open some corks today. They've scored a big legal win for Oregon's environment, since even though Measures 37/49 have passed out of most peoples' minds, some large subdivison developments could still spring back to life if they gained a vested right (OPB called these the "ghosts of Measure 37").

The bad news is that the Supreme Court remanded this case back to Yamhill County for more work consistent with the Supreme's opinion. Sadly, Yamhill County is a hotbed for screwy land use decision-making. The County Commissioners keep getting overruled by higher courts, yet this doesn't seem to pound any sense into their right-wing leaning minds.

Hopefully this Supreme Court decision will cause them to wake up and smell the legal roses. Obey the law, Yamhill County. You may not like Oregon's land use system, but that's irrelevant. You've still got to obey the law.

Lastly, kudos to Supreme Court Judge Rives Kistler for writing such a clear and coherent opinion. As a layperson interested in land use law, I've read quite a few cases that left me wondering what the heck a judge was trying to say. Judge Kistler left no doubt. HIs opinion was solidly legal, of course, but not full of jargon'y legalese.

*Fundraising rules apply. If you're among the richest 1% of U.S. citizens, feel free to give $2,008

Only about six hours left until the premiere of "Salemia," an event that has been eagerly awaited in Oregon's capital -- by those involved with the film, at least -- since the notion of a response to "Portlandia" was birthed from the fertile comedic mind-wombs of local filmmakers Mike Perron and Dave Jenkins.

(Check out Part 1 of an Q & A interview by Emily Grosvenor with Mike and Dave on her Desperately Seeking Salem site.)

After shamelessly sucking up to Mike and Dave through a series of fawning blog posts, and stammering through an audition last February at a "Salemia" casting call, I was thrilled to get a small role as a crusty transient, the precise smallness of which will be revealed at the premiere this evening -- 7:45 pm, Grand Theatre, advance tickets available at Travel Salem or Salem Cinema.

Checking out recent Twitter tweets from "Salemia" cast members, it's obvious that a certain amount of utterly understandable nervousness is in the air, or more accurately, the minds of amateur actors having yin/yang emotional anticipations:

It'll be wonderful to see myself in the film It'll be horrible to see myself in the film

Well, what I've learned from my involvement with "Salemia" is that being concerned with wonderful and horrible is a creative process downer.

As a writer/author, I knew this already. But my brief acting experience in front of a camera hammered home that lesson in a fresh fashion. Driving home after the filming on a cool, rainy April day, my inner critic kept telling me You could have done better; why didn't you do/say X instead of Y?

After awhile I told my alter (or super) ego, Shut the fuck up! Sure, I would have liked to do some things differently, to relive certain filming moments. But moments never can be redone or relived. Life only happens once.

To look back is to miss the present moment. Art is about what's happening now, fully expressing what is present in that happening moment.

And not only art: life as a whole. For example, I'd love it if Salem was a cooler, hipper, more energetic and interesting place than it is. "if's" aren't reality, though. Only "is" is (at the risk of sounding like BIll Clinton).

What we have to deal with is what can be expressed now. Our only choice is how fully to engage ourselves.

My old friend, synchronicity, paid a visit this morning as I was reading "How to Believe in Nothing." Here's a story by author Michael Misita that resonated with my inner aspiring actor, as also with my inner aspiring liver of life.

Expressing one's self can be frightening for most people. I remember an acting class I attended many years ago in New York City. The two actors on stage were doing one of the most boring scenes I had ever witnessed. It wasn't the fault of the material they were performing; it was them.

"What do you think you're doing up there?" the teacher asked them.

After a long pause, one of the actors shyly suggested, "Acting?"

We all laughed.

"We're trying to be real," added the other actor. "I don't want to over-act."

"What do you people think real is?" the teacher inquired. "Certainly not the behavior most people display in their everyday lives. Out there, everyone is repressed, and you think that is an example of real life? As actors, it is our responsibility to express ourselves in a way that everyday people do not because they are too self-conscious. You're not here to be self-conscious. A little over-acting would do you a world of good and hold your audience's attention a whole lot more. They don't pay to come to the theater or go to a movie to see what they can see in their everyday lives. They come to the theater to feel something. They come to see someone express themselves in a way they feel they cannot. Everyone wants to express himself but almost everyone is deathly afraid to do it."

There was momentary silence in the room, then the teacher said, "Now, start the scene again, and for God's sake, give it some life. Take some chances, show some passion, stop playing it safe. Express yourselves!"

Great advice. Mike and Dave have done just that with "Salemia." Kudos and congratulations to them. May all Salemites be inspired to follow in their creative footsteps and do as advised above:

Take some chances, show some passion, stop playing it safe. Express yourselves!

October 17, 2011

Whenever I blog about how boring Salem, Oregon is, there's a pretty good chance someone will leave a comment along the lines of "Your negativity about the town you live in is getting old...like you."

Well, today I stood up for Salem when someone snarkily commented on the Oregonian's story about "Salemia," our film response to "Portlandia." This guy, bruceabishop, said:

Having both lived and worked there previously, it's obvious to me that it should be pronounced "Sa-Lame-Ya", with the accent on the middle syllable.

That deserved a fierce response, an energetic defense of Salem's non-lameness. So I replied:

Hey, bruceabishop, you're way off base calling my city "Sal-Lame-Ya," WAY off base. There's lots of exciting, creative, artistic, entertaining stuff to do in Salem. For example...

Um. OK. Just a second. I need some time to think...

It's coming. Almost got it. Damn! Slipped out of my mind. Wait, wait... the thought will come back. Oh, now I know what I was wanting to say.

My wife and I can get to a freeway on-ramp in just a few minutes. Then it's easy for us to get to Portland, Eugene, the coast, the Cascades. Gotcha! There's plenty to do in Salem. All you need is a car and enough gas to drive 60-90 minutes.

Hope this silences those who feel that I don't give Salem enough credit for... something or other.

THEY, meaning Portland and Eugene, won't have so much reason to mispronounce our semi-fair city's name as So-lame now that the hipster stars of "Portlandia," Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, have acknowledged the creative brilliance of our very own "Salemia" -- sight unseen, even before the premiere this coming Wednesday.

The brains behind "Portlandia" are cool with the notion of "Salemia."

"I love it," said "Portlandia" star Fred Armisen, noting that "Portlandia" began as the web series "Thunderant." "Please tell them to keep going."

"Portlandia" co-star Carrie Brownstein was equally enthusiastic.

"We feel like we're just part of an ongoing conversation that artists in Portland have had with the city and that artists and creative people in other cities in the U.S. and the world are having in the places that they live," she said. "We don't see ourselves as separate or special; we're just one voice among many. We're inspired by other things constantly and it makes us happy that people would be inspired by 'Portlandia.' "

Check out the rest of today's front page story in the Oregonian, "Web series 'Salemia' is a capital idea." (Well, OK, it was on the front page of the Living Section, but that counts.)

Then, plan to attend the premiere at Salem's Grand Theatre, Wednesday October 19, 7:45 pm. I recommend getting in line now, since a "Salemia" frenzy clearly is building and will only grow stronger.

Tip: when you pitch your tent on the High Street sidewalk, bring some anti-Wall Street signs.

Then your campout can do double-duty -- you'll demonstrate your commitment to "Salemia," and passers-by will think that you're one of the Occupy Salem demonstrators who are hanging out in their tents a few blocks away.

October 15, 2011

Today in Salem, Oregon my wife and I joined hundreds of other 99%ers in a march from the Capitol that ended at a rally in Peace Plaza (in this context, "99%" refers to those people less well-off than the top 1% -- who now own 40% of our nation's wealth).

We were part of a vast October 15 worldwide protest against growing wealth inequality. The United States has the fifth-most unequal wealth distribution in the world, and it's getting worse. Our middle class is sinking into lower class status, while the rich keep getting richer.

Here's a five minute video of how the rally started. I was impressed with the unorganized organization of the Occupy ______ movement. Nobody in particular seemed to be in charge of the event, but it went along appealingly smoothly and flowingly. Lao Tzu would be pleased: "In governing, don't try to control."

And here's some iPhone photos that I took of the march/rally.

My wife, Laurel (on the left) and I got to the Capitol about fifteen minutes after the pre-march rally started. We figured the march would be late, just as we almost always are. Nope. The marchers left right on time, with us and a friend, Delana (in the middle) bringing up the rear.

Willson Park, part of the Capitol grounds, was indeed being occupied. We marched by tents put up by the committed core Occupy Salem folks.

A merry band of Silverton People For Peace joined up.

I don't think one traffic law was broken during the march. Heck, I usually jaywalk a lot more on my own. Occupy Salem had monitors at every crosswalk guiding people. Again, great organization for a loosely organized group.

At the Peace Plaza rally, this canine was one of the most enthusiastic chanters. Well, he/she barked. But the dog had the right intention. The sign reads: "Rescue Airedales not Wall St. Bankers - Tax Fat Cats"

Here's the main "stage" of the rally. But people felt free to speak from anywhere.

The people at the rally were a diverse group. Young/old. Countercultural/traditional. Loud/quiet. Everybody was united, though, by a common goal: to get our country and the world back on a fairness track.

This was my wife's favorite sign, a Ghandi quote: "First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; they they fight you; then you win." We need to put something like this together -- a generic protest sign that we can take to any sort of rally.

Laurel and I were signless until someone handed one to my wife. Guess they had to leave early.

Here's our friend, Delana, with a sign she made herself. Note how every word is spelled correctly. That's important when you're a teacher who is saying "Hire our teachers back."

I checked out the Republican legislators who, unfortunately, my wife and I are saddled with here in our right-leaning area of Marion County.

Ugh!

State Senator Brian Boquist got the absolutely lowest OLCV Senate score when it came to voting in support of our Earth's one and only environment: 44%. Amazingly, in the 2011 session he scored even lower than Larry George.

Not only did I manage to get my seemingly dead ("bricked") iPhone working after an initially disastrous upgrade to iOS 5 -- note to self: don't be one of the first to upgrade anything from now on, even an Apple product -- but I felt the fear and downloaded OS X Lion this afternoon, much more successfully.

Right now I feel like I'm King of the World. Or at least, of my MacBook Pro.

After only an hour or so of playing around with Lion, I can tell that I'm going to enjoy Apple's much improved operating system. Downloading and installation took about two hours. No problems. Beforehand I backed my hard drive up and used the Disk Utility to repair permissions, something I'd never done before but probably should have, given how many problems the program found.

The full screen option for most apps is cool. When you only have a 13 inch screen, as I do, making use of every pixel is important -- more important than I realized, now that I see the benefit of browsing with Safari fully screened.

I like being able to move between core applications, Mail, Safari, Calendar, with a three finger horizontal swipe. Feels pleasingly iPad'ish, which it should, given that Apple clearly is moving toward melding the iOS and OS worlds.

Meaning, the iPad feels like a big iPhone, while now my MacBook feels more like a souped-up iPad.

I even was able to get my MobileMe stuff migrated over to The Cloud, where hopefully it won't vanish in wisps of cyberspace vapor. On the first couple of tries I got a "too busy" error message, but the third try was the charm.

So far, Reminders is just about the only big iOS 5 and OS X disappointment.

I've used a lot of to-do list apps, and thought that maybe Apple would hit it out of the park, task manager-wise. So far, though, I'm not at all impressed with Reminders. I'll stick with good old free Wunderlist, which syncs between my iPhone and MacBook just fine.

I was one of the would-be early adopters of iOS 5 who had my iPhone bricked by a screw-up with overloaded Apple servers. (Until yesterday I didn't know what "bricked" meant; after getting a black screen with no ability to connect with iTunes, I sure do know now).

It was hugely frustrating to have iTunes tell me that the iOS 5 update couldn't be completed, and then to have a restore process also fail. I was left with an utterly unworkable iPhone, so I made an appointment with the Genius Bar at the Bridgeport Village Apple Store for 12:30 pm today.

Then, just before going to bed around midnight, I decided to take another look at how other iPhone users were coping with the evident operating system update problems. Finding the TUAW post, I scrolled through the comments.

Save yourself the trip. Google "dfu mode" and try restoring your iPhone later tonight, once the server demand has been eased a bit. I promise you'll be up and running in no time.

Hey, thanks a lot Yuusharo. I took your advice and found a good explanation of how to enter DFU mode, which also explained what this creature is. This was the key info:

How to enter iPhone DFU mode

Connect the iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes

Turn the iPhone off (hold down the power button at the top of the iPhone)

Hold down the sleep/power button and home button together for exactly 10 seconds, then release the power button

Continue to hold down the Home button until a message appears in iTunes telling you an iPhone in recover mode has been detected

Amazingly, I got into DFU mode on the first try. My iPhone was still bricked, with the screen completely dark, but now iTUnes could recognize it and began the recovery process.

Which took a long time. (I've got Navigon and lots of other apps, plus photos, plus music, plus...) But around 1:30 am my iPhone 4 was up and running again, with iOS 5 no less. I felt pretty proud of myself. Also, very sleepy.

Yeah, I probably would have gotten the same advice if I'd called Apple Support, or if I'd taken the phone in to the Genius Bar. Finding a fix on my own was satisfying, though.

I just wish Apple had anticipated how much demand there was going to be for iOS 5 on opening day. It seems crazy that overloaded servers would trash people's phones, rather than simply giving a "come back later" message.

October 11, 2011

Whenever I watch Charles Krauthammer expressing his conservatism on Fox News, or read his right-wing newspaper columns, almost always I strongly disagree with him.

Seeing that his most recent column was about a possible discovery of faster-than-light neutrinos, which I blogged about here, I thought that maybe Charles and I would find some agreement on the common ground of science.

But no, I got as irritated with his "Gone in 60 nanoseconds" as with his overtly political pieces. Because what Krauthammer wants to say goodbye to is trust in modern science.

Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.

...The implications of such a discovery are so mind-boggling, however, that these same scientists immediately requested that other labs around the world try to replicate the experiment. Something must have been wrong — some faulty measurement, some overlooked contaminant — to account for a result that, if we know anything about the universe, is impossible.

And that’s the problem. It has to be impossible because, if not, if that did happen on this Orient Express hurtling between Switzerland and Italy, then everything we know about the universe is wrong.

...But if quantum mechanics was a challenge to human sensibilities, this pesky Swiss-Italian neutrino is their undoing. It means that Einstein’s relativity — a theory of uncommon beauty upon which all of physics has been built for 100 years — is wrong. Not just inaccurate. Not just flawed. But deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong.

That's ridiculously, well, wrong.

Relativity theory didn't disprove Newton's laws of motion. Those laws are as true as ever in most everyday circumstances. Einstein simply showed that relativity theory more accurately reflects how reality behaves in other circumstances.

Likewise, relativity theory hasn't been proven wrong even if the faster-than-light neutrino observation is confirmed to be true (which so far, it hasn't been). As noted in my previous blog post, a leading explanation for the superluminal neutrinos is the existence of another spatial dimension.

The trick is to send neutrinos on a shortcut through a fourth, thus-far-unobserved dimension of space, reducing the distance they have to travel. Then the neutrinos wouldn't have to outstrip light to reach their destination in the observed time.

Special and general relativity have been strongly confirmed by many tests. So it's absurd for Krauthammer to say that relativity "is wrong. Not just inaccurate. Not just flawed. But deeply, fundamentally, indescribably wrong."

Krauthammer and other right-wingers seek to undermine climatologists who present powerful evidence that human-caused global warming is happening, and to kiss up to religious fundamentalists who comprise a large share of the Republican base by challenging the scientific method which, gasp!, finds that evolution is a much explanation for life on Earth than creationism is.

Here's Joe Romm:

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is the implication that “scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories.” That was what Bryce was suggesting by “If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity.” It’s what Krauthammer meant by “If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown.” We scientists just can’t make up our minds, and thus we can’t be trust[ed]. That’s why they keep pushing the myth that all the climate scientists in the 1970s were predicting global cooling.

Back to Newton’s supposedly overthrown laws. As NASA writes: “The motion of an aircraft through the air can be explained and described by physical principals discovered over 300 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton.”

But Professor Krauthammer says 200 years of experiments and observations were “overthrown.” What gives? Why aren’t all our planes falling out of the sky?

They fail in very special cases — speeds close to the speed of light (where you need Einstein’s special theory of relativity), near large gravitational fields (where you need Einstein’s general theory of relativity) or at very, very small scales (where you need quantum mechanics). Interestingly, many of the laws of those three theories are written in the same form as Newton’s and they revert to Newton’s equations for everyday life (see below).

BRYCE AND KRAUTHAMMER ARE NO EINSTEINs

If Einstein’s special theory of relativity did not revert to Newton’s laws for everyday situations, and thus validate 200 years of observations and experiments, nobody would have paid even one minute of attention to it.

Well, that's what anti-science conservatives wish they could do, because to them relativity theory is a club liberals use to bash those who don't embrace a relativistic view of the world. (Of course, factually relativity theory has nothing to do with relativism, but facts don't mean much to conservatives these days).

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.

Thus Charles Krauthammer, per usual, was toeing the conservative party line in his science's sky is falling column. He wants people to believe that if a neutrino can travel faster than light, a fact unaccounted for by Einstein's theory of relativity, then global warming and evolution must be wrong also.

Not true. Not at all. Reality is one thing; conservative fantasies are a whole other thing.

October 09, 2011

If you live in the Salem, Oregon area and enjoy going to plays, check out the Willamette University Theatre offerings. For a long time my wife and I had season tickets to Pentacle Theatre, but we came to yearn for edgier, less predictable plays.

Belatedly, we discovered Salem Repertory Theatre; unfortunately, just before SRT went out of business. Liking the SRT style (basically, anything goes), we were enthused with the first Willamette University Theatre production we went to, "Aquitania."

I didn't understand it, which I assumed meant that it was a deep, thought-provoking, mind-blowing play. Regardless, I'd rather be confused by a play than be bored by it.

"Smash" is the kickoff to Willamette University Theatre's (WUT) new season. It's based on a George Bernard Shaw novel about socialism. Up until intermission I didn't understand Smash very well either. But that's one reason intermissions exist.

So a woman can explain to her significant other (a.k.a. confused husband) what is really happening in the play.

In my defense, there are a lot of words in Smash.

I had the feeling that (1) the playwright, Jeffrey Hatcher, wanted to get a lot of thoughts across in a limited time, and (2) the WUT actors wanted to express those many thoughts rapidly in believable English accents so the audience members would be immersed in a flow of oft-complex verbiage which would carry them along in more of a feeling than thinking drama consciousness vessel.

Or maybe my brain just wasn't working very well during the first act.

Support for that hypothesis is found in the fact that when we walked into the lobby at intermission and I told my wife "This play is really hard to make sense of," she replied, "What are you talking about?"

Laurel agreed with me that the rapid-fire English accents could be tough to decipher at times. But in quick succession she cleared up a number of questions that had me baffled through much of Act 1.

(My wife is a retired psychotherapist, so it isn't surprising that she could pick up on narrative subtleties or obvious'ties which eluded me.)

For example...

Q. Why doesn't Henrietta recognize the husband, Sidney, who left her at the altar, post-marriage, when all he's done to disguise himself is grow a mustache?A. She does! Didn't you get this? She obviously recognized him, but she didn't want anyone else to know this.

Q. Why did Henrietta say that would-be socialist Sidney disappeared because he was abducted, rather than speaking the truth: that he left her at the altar because he feared that marriage would dilute his pro-socialist zeal?A. What did I just tell you?! Henrietta can't let on to her father, or anyone else, that she recognizes Sidney, so the abduction story was made up.

Intermission went on in this vein.

I was pleased to have Smash explained to me, but my male ego was pretty much, well, smashed by the time Act 2 started.

I started to worry about my general ability to understand human interactions, but then rationalized away that anxiety by telling myself that most people in my life don't have English accents, and they don't talk as fact as the WUT actors.

Embarassingly, after the play was over my wife -- rather gleefully -- got to explain to me what "Smash" alluded to, after I'd expressed my meta-perplexity about the title of the play.

The lesson for me here, which I'll take to heart, is to read the entire Director's Notes before a play starts, instead of using the restroom. (Or ideally, getting to a play early enought to do both.)

Laurel had remembered reading that Hatcher wanted to show how becoming too "preachy" about a social cause can be as off-putting as a Jehovah's Witness at your door. Yes, socialism or semi-socialism or slight-socialism has a lot of pluses. However, trying to smash those who resist what you're advocating usually isn't the best way to influence people.

My wife and I both thoroughly enjoyed Smash (me, especially after I understood it, more or less).

We were impressed with the fine acting of each and every member of the cast. I thought Josh Rice did a particularly good job playing Sidney, though the dramatic expressiveness of Margaret Smith, who played a girl's school headmistress, also was hugely entertaining.

It was refreshing to be exposed to a play that we'd never heard of, yet was about a subject that is as topical today as it was back in the late 1800's: how to change the world without being a total asshole about it.

(Oh, by the way, just in case you don't notice, my name appears at the 43 second mark, not that I'm into self-promotion, leaving aside this self-serving blog that I've devoted myself to for eight years; also, there is no connection between the words "Brian Hines" and the large bicycling butt shown above my name, which, thankfully, does not belong to me.)

Yeah, "Bring You Down" marvelously captures the Salem vibe. I'm too geezer'ish to understand most of the lyrics to the song, but I could decipher these lines:

No, I don't want to bring you down.Sometimes, there's no place else to go.

You nailed it, Axolotl Daydream (whose band leader is TIm King). That's Salem! It tries hard to be an interesting, creative, energetic, stimulating, forward-looking city, but almost always it disappoints.

Which won't be the case with "Salemia," I'm betting. Filmmakers Mike Perron and Dave Jenkins are talented enough to be immune to Salem's Blah Witch curse.

But what if, against all odds, they aren't? What if "Salemia" turns out to be boring? Well, the film will still be a great success, because it will have wonderfully reflected its subject matter.

So come out and cheer/boo Salemia on October 19 at the Grand Theatre. No reason not to, Salemites, since there isn't much else to do in this town on a Wednesday night.

October 05, 2011

Great news. The Oregon Court of Appeals has granted the request of three conservation groups to temporarily halt the hunt of two wolves in Eastern Oregon.

Governor Kitzhaber should have ordered the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) to do this on his own, rather than forcing Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity and Oregon Wild to step in.

It's crazy that ranchers get compensated for documented wolf kills, yet ODFW also jumps into action as soon as a wolf-hating rancher demands that the last breeding pair in Oregon also be killed.

Yesterday I sold our 2007 Prius Touring for a fair price: $16,000. The buyer was happy, and I'm happy. So now that I've had the vast experience of one recent private party used car sale, I'll share my tips for car-selling in this Internet age.

In short: AutoTrader good, Craigslist bad. I only got two serious inquiries about the car, both through AutoTrader.

My Craigslist ad mostly resulted in email messages that said: "Location? I can pick it up," along with "How much are you asking for this car ?? Ive been wanting to buy one like this so if you can please email me back thank you," and another "Location? I can pick it up" from a different scammer.

Dudes, be more creative.

The asking price was clearly listed on the ad. I'm not so stupid to believe that someone is going to buy and pick up the car sight unseen. The only good thing I can say about Craigslist is that the value of the ad I put up was equal to the price I paid for it: nothing.

By contrast, I found the AutoTrader web site to be wonderfully easy to navigate. I paid extra for several add-on features that supposedly gave my ad more visibility. Don't know if that helped, but I sold the Prius in about three weeks via AutoTrader.

It wasn't a lot of fun, but I felt like I had no choice after realizing that selling our car to a dealer wasn't going to net us what the Prius was worth to a private party. The Corvallis Nissan dealer -- where we recently bought a Leaf electric car -- offered a decent amount: about $14,500, which was the Kelly Blue Book estimate for a "good" condition trade-in.

That was a fair offer. But another dealer, who would go anonymous if I didn't want to mention that the name is Capitol Toyota here in Salem, gave me an insultingly low offer of $12,500.

So here's another tip: don't expect that just because you've bought three cars from a new car dealer (in our case, two Priuses/Prii and a Highlander Hybrid), and that dealer has regularly been mailing postcards to you saying "Your Toyota used car is in demand; call us today to find out how much it is worth," you'll get a fair price from the dealer.

Previously I'd traded in our 2004 Prius when my wife and I bought the 2007 Prius Touring. At that time, a Capitol Toyota salesman who I liked a lot, and would go anonymous if I didn't want to mention that his name is Kelly Stewart (Kelly now is with Capitol's Chevrolet dealership), simply went into his office for a few minutes and came out with a Kelly Blue Book report that showed the trade-in value -- which was exactly the same price that I'd gotten when I visited the Kelly Blue Book site myself.

When I brought in the 2007 Prius for a look-see, though, having been advised by our Nissan salesman that a Toyota dealer should give us more for the car than his dealership could, a used car guy at Capitol Toyota handed me a Edmund's report that showed our car as being in "rough" condition. He said the best he could do was $12,500.

I said, thanks and walked out the door.

Here's a tip for new car dealerships: if you give a three-peat customer a low-ball price when he asks how much his four year old car is worth, if he ever thinks about getting another new car from your dealership, he's going to remember what happened and question whether he can get a fair deal.

Our 2007 Prius wasn't in "rough" condition. It had one small ding on the front passenger door. Otherwise it was in near perfect shape. Yesterday the couple who paid $16,000 for it said, "Wow, it looks great." I honestly filled out the Kelly Blue Book car condition questions and learned that our car indeed was in "good" condition -- as most used cars are.

I'm not saying that all car salespeople can't be trusted. Most can be. We thoroughly enjoyed how Russ Goodyear (great name for a car salesman) treated us at Jack Scoville Nissan in Corvallis. I'm just reminding people to do their research before heading to a dealership to get a quote on what a used car is worth.

All I can figure is that Capitol Toyota assumed that I might be clueless about what our car was worth, and/or desperate to sell it at a ridiculous low-ball price. Regardless, I found that $12,500 offer to be insulting, if not borderline dishonest (since the car clearly wasn't in rough condition).

My only other tip for a private party sale is to treat a prospective buyer like you would want to be treated yourself.

I don't like playing price-negotiating games. Some people do. In that case, maybe you can justify sticking with a high asking price and trying to argue a potential buyer out of a lower offer.

But after several weeks of not selling the car at a price that started at $17,900, I reduced the asking price to just above what I honestly thought the car should go for: $16,495. (Kelly Blue Book had the private party price at $15,850, but our Prius had new tires with just a few hundred miles on them.)

I realized that since I don't like to price-negotiate, if I saw a car for sale that I was interested in, yet the price was a thousand dollars or more above what I thought was a fair offer, I'd be inclined to look elsewhere.

So I changed the AutoTrader and Craigslist ads to say $16,495. Within a day a woman emailed me and said, "Would you accept $16,000? If so, we'll bring you a cashier's check and pick up the car."

Done.

I'll end with a comment to Capitol Toyota, in case someone from the dealership ever reads this blog post. If you guys had offered me $15,000 for the Prius, I would have seriously considered the offer. You then could have made at least a thousand dollars on the deal. Probably more, given that you've got a lot more experience selling cars than I do.

I don't understand why car dealers aren't 100% into buying and selling quality cars for a fair price. In this country, car dealerships are just about the last place where ordinary people buying retail still have to often engage in intense price negotiating and sales game-playing.

That isn't appealing to me. And it isn't necessary.

Last night I sat at our dining table with the people who bought our car, having a pleasant conversation and signing papers in an absolutely relaxed manner. Like I said, treating the other party in the transaction like you'd like to be treated if you were in their shoes goes a long way to making a car deal go smoothly and fairly.

October 03, 2011

Whenever something creative, energetic, and enticing comes on the Capital City scene, it encouragingly flashes into life, then starts to dim until Salem's stultifying atmosphere snuffs it out. At best, a few mildly glowing embers remain to remind us of the luster that a genuinely vibrant urban area, such as Portland, offers its residents.

One example is the Sustainable Fairview project that my wife and I bought shares in quite a few years ago. Plans were for a world-class mixed use oh-so-Green development featuring residences, lots of open space, and a village center where people could mingle, shop, and play.

They're doing a great job, but what's transpired on the location of the old Fairview Training Center isn't anywhere close to what was planned. Meanwhile, the Villebois sustainable development in Wilsonville, a sister project to Sustainable Fairview, has moved ahead nicely.

Like I said, Salem is cursed.

Here's more proof: the vaunted renovation of the disgustingly ugly Boise Cascade site near the downtown riverfront looks like it is going to be a shadow of what was promised back in 2009.

A dreary and vacant industrial complex along Salem’s waterfront is poised to become a gem, said Tim Gerling, a consultant working on the redevelopment of the Boise Cascade site.

“What we’re talking about is true mixed use on a scale that Salem has not seen before,” Gerling said.

...The 13-acre Boise site has already attracted interest from prospective occupants, including a health club, a hotel, restaurant and an office user. No deals have been finalized, Gerling said The consultant, a former public works director for Salem, gave the business community on update on the Boise Cascade site at a luncheon sponsored by the Strategic Economic Development Corp. More than 150 people attended the Thursday event.

In 2007, developers Dan Berrey and Larry Tokarski purchased the Boise Cascade site in downtown Salem for $7.25 million. The mixed-use development proposed for the property would include office buildings, shops, restaurants, and condominiums. It is designed to complement, not compete with the city’s existing downtown businesses, Gerling said.

So my wife and I pictured being able to walk to the development from downtown, strolling along the river to restaurants, shopping, night spots. We could enjoy a taste of Paris, or at least San Antonio, sipping our lattes with a view of Minto Brown Island and pleasantly people-watching.

Changes in the real estate market stifled plans for redevelopment before they could become reality, and Tokarski said his group literally has had to go back to the drawing board."What we have done is looked at what the market wants right now, and that is apartments," Tokarski said.

...The next phase will be at the structure to the south of the creek. The current structure will be reinforced to better stand up to a seismic event, then the lower two floors will be remodeled to accommodate 500 indoor parking spaces.

The top floor will be demolished to make way for four new levels with space for 100 apartments, a 10,000-square-foot day care center and up to 12,000 square feet of "neighborhood" retail space, Tokarski said.

After years of talk, studies, proposals, etc., we finally get an idea of what the new owners of the Boise Cascade site are planning for this critical riverfront property.

What a joke! One hundred apartments and a huge parking structure, all based on rehabbing an old industrial warehouse?

Downtown Salem does not need 100 apartments and a mega-parking structure. To construct that amount of apartments obviously means they will likely be low-income units because Salem can't fill any of the "upscale" units that already exist.

I can't imagine too many professional, medical or retail companies that would want to locate in that environment.

The developers are taking the "cheapest" way to maximize their investment. What happened to the multi-use, park-like setting with shops, restaurants, open spaces, etc., that was originally touted?

This plan is a big mistake and would turn the property into another eyesore and waste of potential. But it would complement Courthouse Square and provide a view of the storage units that border Wallace Marine Park and enhance the beauty of our West Salem Riverfront.

Come on Salem, wake up to this "fiasco." Don't allow this waste of prime downtown riverfront. Make it something that all of us can enjoy and take pride in.

John, I admire your optimism and enthusiasm. But you're forgetting about the Salem curse. We're doomed to mediocrity. We'll always look north to Portland and south to Corvallis/Eugene and think, why can't Salem be more like those cities?

Today the Statesman Journal also had a front page story about Salem's Courthouse Square debacle, "What went wrong at Courthouse Square?"

Richard Rogers, a manager at the Oregon Building Codes Division, said there is an expectation that "someone will chase through these (engineering) calculations" to determine the viability of structures. In his 11 years with the state's building codes division, Rogers said he hasn't seen another real estate development with the magnitude of problems found at Courthouse Square.

Of course you haven't, Richard. There's only one cursed city in Oregon, Salem.

Friends of Marion County, a land use advocacy group my wife and I are close friends with, is having a "Farming or Folly?" community forum this coming Thursday, October 6, 2011 at the Salem Public Library.

See press release info below.

I'll be attending, because I haven't made my mind up on the farming or folly expanded uses question.

Some people don't like the idea of a winery, say, being able to host marriage parties or other events. They consider that bringing a hundred or more people onto farmland isn't really appropriate, and fear non-farm uses will steadily erode the character of Oregon's rural areas.

Well, given how tough it is to make a living as a farmer these days, I lean toward giving farmers quite a bit of leeway when it comes to making a buck. But maybe I'll learn stuff at the forum that will lead me to change my mind.

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Farming or Folly?Expanded Uses on Farmland

Friends of Marion County, an advocacy group dedicated to sustainable land-use policies, is sponsoring a community forum to take place Thursday, October 6, 2011, 7 PM; Salem Public Library, Anderson Room “A”, 585 Liberty St., SE, Salem.

The forum, “Farming or Folly? Expanded Uses on Farmland” will focus on a Marion County ordinance and also increased types of activities allowed on farmland due to laws passed during the 2011 legislative session. Legislative issues for 2012 will also be discussed.

Panel members include David Epling, Planner, Marion County Public Works; Steve Berrios, Inspector, Oregon Liquor Control Commission; and Steve McCoy, Farm and Forest Staff Attorney, 1000 Friends of Oregon.

The public is invited to attend and participate in the discussion. Refreshments will be served.

For further information contact: Friends of Marion CountyRoger Kaye503-743-4567[email protected]

October 01, 2011

Too often, we Oregonians take our state for granted. We focus on what our Pacific Wonderland lacks rather than feeling appreciative for the oh-so-special nature of Oregon.

Every time I fly back to Portland from some flat, brown, fir-tree-lacking part of the country, and a Mt. Hood panorama fills the airplane window, I think Wow! I'm so fortunate to live here.

The past few days some car-related conversations helped reinforce that feeling.

Last night we had dinner with some friends. I mentioned how Laurel and I had recently bought a Nissan Leaf, the first 100% electric car offering from a major manufacturer. (Our 2007 Prius Touring is for sale -- great deal.)

A guy who I don't see too often pulled out his iPhone and clicked away on it, then leaned over to show me his own new electric "baby."

Yeow!

A Model S Tesla -- 300 mile range, 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds. He'd put down a $5,000 deposit on a car that will be produced in 2012. Way cool. He didn't even know what Oregon dealer -- almost certainly one in Portland -- will be handling the Tesla.

He just knew that he wanted one. I couldn't blame him. The Tesla is about twice as spendy as our $35,000 Leaf (before $9,000 in tax credits), but it also will have more than twice the range and be almost twice as fast.

In Oregon, as in Hollywood, electric cars are trendy. Our sensibilities are much Greener than the nation as a whole. In this state it's much easier to do the right thing for our excessively warming planet and go electric.

Take a look at The EV Project map of the six states (Oregon is one) plus D.C. taking part in a stimulus-funded effort to support electric car charging infrastructure. Eighteen cities are involved; four are in Oregon -- Portland, Salem, Corvallis, Eugene. Washington state only has one city; California, three.

Oregon is a renewable energy wonderland, a still-evolving sustainable paradise. Yes, we have a long ways to go before our state has lowered its carbon emissions to a truly desirable level. We're way ahead of most other states, though.

As evidenced by another car conversation I had this evening at a Tai Chi class potluck. One of my fellow students recently acquired a used Honda Insight, the original hyper-mileing hybrid. She and her husband said it can get 70 mpg, even more if it's in a good mood (and headed downhill, I assume).

Another of our friends bought a new green Insight when it first came on the market back in 2000. Two seats, manual transmission, no AC (I believe) -- but Earth-friendly. Such is the stuff a pleasingly large percentage of Oregonians are made of: commitment to preserving the environment in a highly livable state for our children and grandchildren.

Whenever I get depressed about where the United States is heading, which often seems nowhere but down with all the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. these days, I turn my thoughts close to home, to Oregon.

This state is leading the Green way in many areas: sustainability, renewable energy, electric car infrastructure, fostering a bicycle-friendly culture, organic farming. Even if the rest of the country goes to pot, Oregon can be a environmental beacon (along with possibly going to pot in its own fashion).